


fox upon a field of thorns

by SearchingforSerendipity



Series: the old and secret whispers 'verse [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, F/M, Feminist Themes, Gen, Magic, witch!Selyse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-01
Updated: 2016-11-01
Packaged: 2018-08-22 11:01:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8283523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/pseuds/SearchingforSerendipity
Summary: Selyse of Brightwater Keep is born at that time of the year when harvest is underway. The maester worries over her silence, certain something must be wrong for the child to be born open-eyed and strangely tinted fingers and toes.But the green fades soon, and the year end well, with the best harvest in many years and more, and the old folk can be heard giving thanks for the Old God's blessing. Blessings, of course, oft turn out to look much like curses.





	

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Selyse of Brightwater Keep is born at that time of the year when harvest is underway. The maester worries over her silence, certain something must be wrong for the child to be born open-eyed and strangely tinted fingers and toes, the hue of freshly unfolded leaves.
> 
> But the green fades soon, and the year end well, with the best harvest in many years and more, and the old folk can be heard giving thanks for the Old Gods blessing. 
> 
> Blessings, of course, oft turn out to look much like curses.

 

 

 

  
— 

It used to be said Garth Greenhand, High King of the First Man, could make the land florish on a whim and trees grow on command. It is said all being of air and earth loved him and did his biding, and even the little fishes in the rivers and the big fish in the sea came to the surface to hear his words.

It is said his seed was plentiful, that maids flowered in his presence and any woman he bedded bore healthy children. It is said his descents were many and mighty, the future heads pg the Great Houses of the Reach.

It is said, even, that sometimes, when the moon is at her fullest, the earth at her wildest, the tides at their strongest, that the seed and sap and blood of Garth the Green, Garth The Good King, will awaken and set roots in any child conceived at this time.

(And that the harvests were rich and the orchards ripe with round fruits, and there was no hunger, and the swords of men were bright and unbloodied.

But then, it is also told that the children of the forest were wild and terrible foes, that sap ran like water down the forest soil, weirdwoods burning with strange, red ash. And all the old green powers died a slow death at the hands of men.

The tales lie.)

 

–

Selyse of Brightwater Keep is born at that time of the year when harvest is underway. The maester worries over her silence, certain something must be wrong for the child to be born open-eyed and strangely tinted fingers and toes, the hue of freshly unfolded leaves.

But the green fades soon, and the year end well, with the best harvest in many years and more, and the old folk can be heard giving thanks for the Old Gods blessing. 

Blessings, of course, oft turn out to look much like curses.

 

–

House Florent thrives in rivaling the Tyrell's, and this extends to their scholarly persuits. The library at Brightwater Keep is well-populated in books if not in visitor, every tome a petty challenge to Highgarden's far more furnished shelves.

Selyse grows up there, unkind and quiet amongst mold-eaten parchment and aging cherrywood. There's a corner, far to the left of the room, and she sets her roots there, builts herself a fortress of knowledge and far away musings. Her mother died of sweating sickness, was never the same after giving birth to Erren, Ser Ryam knows not how to deal with a girl and is not interested in learning. She has no use for Imry nor he for her, reckless and noisy as he his, Father's jolly son, nevermind she's older and far more capable. She likes spending time with little Elmy, but Father forbade her to tell him stories lest he grow soft as a woman, even though Elmy cried when he scrapped his arm and Selyse was quiet as a mouse whenever she fell. 

On one of those days, when Elmy was yet a babe at arms, that she first grows a plant. She is alone, the nurse busy with her cousins, and the duck she had been watching by the lake had flown off. Selyse had followed, because that plain brown duck was her favorite, and the rock in her path had gone unnoticed until she tripped and fell over. Her hands had been scatched on a small bush, just to the side of the road. Her blood had beaded on the stout little thorn, glittering red against the dark green, and beneath her finger's the earth hummed with a low familiar song. 

The bramble bush grows slowly. The berries are the bright red of sunsets and youthful blood, and the thorns long and cruel as swords. 

Selyse arms herself in battle strategies and medicinal tomes, pretends she's sewing flesh instead of lace. Her books are heavy, her legs strong from scouring the fields for herbs for the maester. If this is a woman's softness, she thinks in bed, kept awake by aching eyes and needle-callused fingertips in the cloying night, than men are very weak indeed.

Delana, Rhea and Melessa live with her. They share a septa and a room and not much else. Selyse is a strange child, would much rather spend her time amongst her books or the trees of the nearby forest than sewing and practicing her courtesies. Melessa is sweet, but Delana is not wont to think things through and Rhea delights in reminding her of her lower position as daughter to the second youngest brother of the lord of the family. Selyse learns how to walk on soundless feet, to keep an excuse on the tip of her tongue always, how to laugh at her lack of grace, even when it was not her own doing. 

Her ears, ugly as they are, are busy with distant, half-hidden sounds. She always knows lies from truth, without knowing why or what. It turns her shyness to reticence, meekness into wariness, and causes her to seek out good books and quiet places, more knowledge to fill her up from the inside.

She and her counsins pick up flowers together. Delena and Melessa and even Rhea, who is visiting, beckon her to their giggling gaggle. Even then she stood apart, but she so longed for company that when they called she went, and tried not to mind their mocking when it came. But one time she oresented Melessa with a flower, lavander because it was her favorite, and Melessa laughs and laughs when Selyse's fingers come from the steam a bright green, and cries when the lavander turns to nettle in her hand. 

She never trusts anyone afterwards. It is a cold, heavy life; it is the only life she knows. 

It chafes at her, her destiny as a breeding mare. Her mother had been of Hightower descent, and it shows in the way she excells at her studies. When she's younger she asks questions all the time, her only response bellitling and canings. She learns to look for the answers herself, amonst old scrolls and with her own sharp eyes and large Florent ears. Early morning strolls in the woods and gardens make her well know by the small folk while her generosity makes her well loved. It is a pact and a part that she can play passably well.

There, though, amongst tall oaks and vine-coated aspens, a crofter's wife sworn to secrecy teaches her the ways of the earth, how to plant, sow and tend to growing things. Some days the village's midwife comes too and tells her things the maester doesn't know, doesn't teach her. Herbs and how to crush them, herbs to sooth and arouse and kill, the kind of knowledge that never finds its way to an old man's musty tomes. That these poor, worn women have kwoledge others fear and envy makes them great in her greedy eyes.

There is a method to cleaning ones hands of dirt and grass and blood before returning to a ladies parlor. When the willows whisper faraway tiding and long lost tales, she listens. When the soil sings under her hands, she listens. The tinder-wood screams at her as the brazier fire consumes it, and she listens at its wailing, because winter is cold and cruel it makes cold and more crueler.

For a long time, its the only thing she does. Until it isn't.

She knows her moonblood is coming before it ever reddens her gowns. Its in the way the trees lean ever so slightly to her, the flower stems that become just a little straighter in her wake, just a lityle stronger. Its in the fire that curses in her veins and burns and aches and burns.

Selyse awakens, all at once and not at all. The world is a melody, a cacophony of life and death and whatever else happens in between. It feels like all her life has been leading to this moment, every bloodied knee and wavering stitch a price to pay for the pregnant moon above her, the sticky lifeblood between her tights.

She rises from her bed early, a nightgown-clad shadow under the pink-purple-black sky, while the stars tale their time bowing to the sun. She kneels in the dirt for a long time, toes wiggling happily, ears attuned to a new song. When she has heard all she needs to hear, her hands go under her nightshift. They come back bloody.

This time, when she sinks them in dark rich soil, as the surrounding plants grow from seedlings into trees and the forest arouses at her will, there's no one else to notice the skin turning green under ripe mud and flowering blood.

 

–

She goes to Harrenhall, because she's a lady of House Florent and its the done thing. The done thing for ladies of House Florent is to fawn over be-armored knights and use absurdly contrived hats in hopes of masking their large ears. Selyse prefers knights of the chronicled variety and is rather fond of her own ears. They remind her of the foxes she feeds in the woods, the ones that sometimes allow her to pet them, before Erren or Ilny or the Septa came and offended them with their presence.

Still, decorum musk the kept, says the septa, wich is rather rich for someone who spends an unordinary amount of time with Brightwater Keep's Septon 'studying the Faith', but Selyse keeps her head down lest she be forbidden from the library and makes to remember her curtesies (say nothing of interest and only when spoken to by people who have nothing of interest to say. Be as dour as you can get away with and as sharp as they will let you be. Never let them guess you are stern with secrets.).

She keeps her head down, eyes slanted, ears perked up always. She notices much, and for once keeps her mind is in the present, because she's read enough and stood enough times bare-feeted under storms to know when the world trembles and shifts.

She noticed how loud the heir of the Stormlands is, how he sniffs around his betrothed like she's more bitch than wolf. Selyse watches, quiet as a mouse (as a fox), and uses the ears cruel children and cruel nobles titter over to catch word of three Frey squires bested by a mad wolf, rumors about the Knight of the Laughing Tree. The crown prince has a dreamlike face and dreamy eyes, and Selyse, who is closely acquainted with using one's power and calling it imagination sees the reverse in him, sees the madness, the palaces painted on air and make-believe purposes.

All those nights nights in their tent, she lies awake. The Island is close, and the smell of it drifts in the wind, older and not nearly as alive as the forests of the Reach. A dead smell to fit these dead walls. When she closes her eyes and let's her thoughts fade away, the sounds in the wind are those of ghosts singing, children laughing among the trees. They call to her, beckoning. 

Selyse has never been so terrified. 

 _You cannot have me_ , she whispers in the dark, hands curling together, _you can't have me, not me, I won't be yours._ For the first time, she does not dare touch green growing things. It is just as well; whatever lays roots in this land is sick and easily stepped upon. It is a weakness she wants no part of. 

When the war begins in earnest, the Florents declare for the rebelling forces, for many reasons that come down to the fact that the Tyrells don't. The men in the yard speak of brave Robert fighting for his woman and Selyse keeps her athame sharp, trains her aim on the bedpost, carves herself a place in the healing tents. Let the men bleed. She's been training how to sew them up all her life.

 

  
–

There is her betrothed, a squire on his way to knighthood, a boy who never becomes a man. He dies, and his plain faced lady buries herself shoulder deep into dying men entrails and barely takes the time to remember him.

Ser Ryam has been dead of a fall from a horse for a year when the banners are called, her uncles and cousins are at war, even Imry is off helping an old man get dressed for butchering. Aunt Melara rules the household in Uncle Alester's absence. Melessa and Delana whisper in the drawing room, embroider mourning clothes and sigh over the great deeds the men are sure to be committing at that very moment.

Selyse's rebellion is a careful, seamless thing. Her Aunt and her have an agreement, helped in much by the rumours of Tyrell and Hightower ladies lending an hand to the ill. To be sure, they do not a half of Selyse's bloody work, but she is careful and the people of the land have an queer respect for her and the living things that chase her heels.The midwife that once taught teaches her war-tine healing, how to amputate a man's arm, how to reapect the dizzying thrill of having someone's life under her hands. It is unlike and yet not to coaching a bush to life, human organs a burst of energy compared to the steady flow of a single leaf. 

She spends her every waking moment sawing and cleaning and bandaging, does almost as much sewing than both her cousins combined. She ends up collapsing in a cot in the healing tents, goes to a short sleep sweaty and bloodied to the moans and screams of those for whom there isn't enough milk of the poppy. It's a disgusting, thankless job, saving lives and giving the gift of mercy. It's the happiest Selyse has ever been.

It goes on like this for an year, but the healing tents stay long after King Robert Baratheon, First of His Name, takes Cersei Lannister as a bride. By then the men are back home, scared and sharpened by the war, ignorant of all the ways the void they left was filled. She masks her involvement as a womanly desire to nurture the poor crippled soldiers, a bashful request to Uncle Alester. The Lord of Brightwater Keep came back from this war older and tired, and Selyse has always been his favorite, though Uncle Axell watches her disdainfully, sees her as an intruder in a man's world. And maybe he's right, but that's hardly a discouragement.

When men conquer, they become kings; when women do it they are shameful.

That knowledge, that sure certainty of superiority, the smirks and the long looks: she hates it with a prickly, furious passion. Her hands turn  green near blood and sap, her ears hear secrets of lore and legend, and yet she is thought only ignorant and ugly, her worth only in her bride-price and passed on name. 

She turns her slights into hidden victories, like the witch-maid in the tales that spun wheat into gold. Selyse has no talent with weaving and the sort, but she listens to the trees and the stone and the wind, sometimes, and she knows better than to make anyone think her anything but helpless.

The disguise is thin. Her revenges must only be small and careful, even if they come easily to her. She makes it up with ruthlessness, and the maids that she hears tittering at her ears lose their hair, and her cousin cannot remember names for a fortnight, and between pranks that are not pranks, never truly were playful, Selyse stays awake for many hours considering how to best kill him. She lets him live, in the end, because she is of the green growing things, and there is value in withholding death, but some part of her shatters with the considering. 

It is a hard to thing, to get to know your own harshness. 

 

It doesn't surprise her that he finds her a husband. That he managed to barter her to the King's brother is an unexpected but not all together unexpected conclusion for their silent struggle. Selyse goes out that night into the groove, burns incense and moss flowers and thyme with orange blossoms, follows the directions of the trees. 

Selyse lets them think they win a war they never knew about, and for once it is not as bitter as loss. 

 

–

The siege of Storm's End lasts for one year more. That alone gives her an indication of her future husband's temperament. It becomes clear to her on the few occasions they see each other before the wedding that Stannis Baratheon is also curt, unpersonable and self-contained to the point of hostility. He seems to prefer to spend his time with the smuggler the man call the onion knight than with his brother the king and other nobles. He's a generally unpleasant fellow with no interest in getting to know her, or in actually socializing with the highborn guests.

Selyse does not like him. 

Obviously it is mutual. Her misguided betrothed seemed to be under the impression her worth was in her plain face and ungainly figure. She'd correct him soon enough, but first she makes it a point to meet her future brother in law. Not the king, but the young Lord of Storm's End, jolly Renly who got a castle and a title he had no need or right to. It's hardly the lad's fault, he's easy to like and she makes herself likable, though she wonders what kind of person he'll grow to be, alone but for doting servants and no one to tell him no. She promises herself to watch out over him. The way she won't be able to do for Elmy.

Master Cressen is another friend she makes, if for no other reason than because she makes her business to befriend as many Maesters as she can. He is a capable Maester, devoted to the Baratheons and she doesn't think she's wrong in detecting a certain preference for Stannis. Regardless, he's a perfectly nice fellow that takes her interest in medicine and quest for knowledge, and offers his books for her use, and so she makes sure his small withered hort florishes soon enough. 

After that, it's just a matter of being in the right place at the same time. Her betrothed is clearly startled to find her in the library, but she inclines her head and dispenses with formalities that would just be painful and pointless. He settles in a desk of his own, and after a while she gets lost into an account of the Ghiseni empire before the rise of Valyria. It's not an entirely comfortable silence, and it was bound to get worse, when she turns to him. Stannis swallows, less a besieged lord and more a green boy, green if not for those hard blue eyes of his. 

"What are your thoughts on Valantis' war strategy against the Summer Islands?"

It comes out curt and daring, a challenge. Sylese tilts her chin and does not smile. She is not here to plase her lord, regardless of what he expecte.

They argue and debate and let cold silences liger over cold evenings, but in the end it serves to ease both of them into a sort of companionship. He's terribly awkward, Selyse's social graces are not enough to soften her conviction's, and the only thing they talk about is volantesi war strategy and the patterns of keeping the land, and they don't always agree there, but by the time the wedding day comes they know each other. Whatever their thiughts on wach other, it is far better than ignorance. 

They do not dance, nor do they speak. The songs are pleasent enough, the smell of food a relief from the air of the sept, thick with incenses and perfumes. They had agreed before hand that there had would be no bedding cerimony, the both of them united in their reusal to follow that humiliation.

They are humiliated regardless.

 

"Well then, Your Grace, with your leave, we shall be taking the royal chambers."

Spine straight, Selyse took her newly acquired husband by the arm and marched them from wath was supposed to be their wedding bed.

She doesn't look at Delana, at her rumpled skirts and swollen lips. She will never look at Delana without wanting to pain her, at least a little. Not just for herself, she's used to ridicule,  even if she loaths it and has a long memory, but for the man by her side as well. Stannis had grown on her, the way that sticky green-yellow moss used to on the shaded side of Brightwater Keep's oaks and crags, and she knows him now, not well but enough to understand how his brother's lack of respect angers him, wounds him.

The indignation separates them before it unites them. They retire to the best chamber's of the house, where kings and queens had lain before. Stannis paces and she glowers at the fire until his movements get on her nerves and she snaps at him. 

("Do you believe yourself to own the full share of all indignities?" 

"You know not of what you speak, woman."

"And you know nought of me, _man_. Sit down and be still, they can hear your pacing beneath. Would you have them know of it?")

 And yet the night is not a disaster, for some measure of understanding is born of it. She might not curse Delana, after all.

The King, on the other hand, finds his mead and wine sour for the three moons after. Selyse smiles her small secret smile all the first days of her married life. 

–

And then there's Dragonstone. 

 And it is terrible and heavy and old, alive with fire-smoke in a way that made Harrenhall seem like a graveyard. Here the stone covers foaming rivers and the sea churns with dark shapes within, here the sun hides and storms chase each other in frightfull hunts. The very air presses close to her, the shore scorching her feet through her thin-soled booths. The ind is cold and cruel on her face.

This place is lifeless and livid, and it will try to suck the vitality out of her, make her womb grey as stone. This dead dirt and black sand and the utter lack of green; this will be her siege and her fight, the battle she had been waiting for her whole life. 

Selyse straightens her back and thinks, _finally I will be a conqueror._  

 

 


End file.
